From the greatest minds in business today comes a groundbreaking new blueprint for executing the next stage of customer-created value. C.K. Prahalad, the world's premier business thinker, and IT scholar M.S. Krishnan unveil the critical missing link in connecting strategy to execution--building organizational capabilities that allow companies to achieve and sustain continuous change and innovation.
The New Age of Innovation reveals that the key to creating value and the future growth of every business depends on accessing a global network of resources to co-create unique experiences with customers, one at a time. To achieve this, CEOs, executives, and managers at every level must transform their business processes, technical systems, and supply chain management, implementing key social and technological infrastructure requirements to create an ongoing innovation advantage.
In this landmark work, Prahalad and Krishnan explain how to accomplish this shift--one where IT and the management architecture form the corporation's fundamental foundation. This book provides strategies for
Redesigning systems to co-create value with customers and connect all parts of a firm to this process
Measuring individual behavior through smart analytics
Ceaselessly improving the flexibility and efficiency in all customer-facing and back-end processes
Treating all involved individuals--customers, employees, investors, suppliers--as unique
Working across cultures and time-zones in a seamless global network
Building teams that are capable of providing high-quality, low-cost solutions rapidly
To successfully compete on the battlefields of 21st-century business, companies must reinvent their processes and culture in order to sustain innovative solutions. The New Age of Innovation is a complete program for achieving this transformation to meet the needs of the end consumer of the future.
Excellent and informative This is a great book - it brings together a whole host of ideas into one thread which paints a realistic and insightful picture of the modern world around us. Lots of real world examples and easy to understand. Highly recommended.
Smart authors, thoughtful book, but The New Age of Innovation is divided into an Introduction and eight chapters. The Introduction will tell you how the authors came to write the book and how their key ideas of N = 1 and R = G were developed.
The Transformation of Business is the authors' description of how business is moving toward a focus on the individual customer experience and drawing resources from everywhere.
Chapter two discusses Business Processes as the way a company can gain competitive advantage by reconfiguring resources in real time. There are many examples here, but not much guidance on what it means for you.
The Analytics chapter calls for sophisticated systems that can mine every scrap of data, identify trends, and reveal opportunities. The emphasis is on mining internal information but the part about R = G seems to have gotten lost. There's virtually no discussion of outside data sources or collaborators.
IT Matters is about the technical architecture for innovation. It is primarily a wish list about what IT ought to do. This could easily be converted into a checklist for system capability if you're considering changes in your IT systems.
Chapter five, Organizational Legacies, is about how companies have cultures and values and those cultures and values need to change if the business is going to change successfully. The main illustration in this chapter is the first Indian firms to offer outsourcing. The authors don't seem to know about the second wave of outsourcing firms, mostly founded after 2000 who are modeling their business plans on what to do differently than their predecessors.
This was the most disappointing chapter of the book for me. There were lots of neat diagrams and lots of pronouncements but there didn't seem to be much understanding of how very hard it is to change a company's culture. The entire process is treated as similar to changing the operating system in an IT department, technically difficult perhaps, but nothing some good planning and dedicated engineers can't handle.
The chapter on Efficiency and Flexibility highlights a challenge that every company that has ever tried to be both nimble and efficient has faced. There is a distinct tension between the two and it is often not resolvable. The chapter also discusses problems moving from the old way to the new way.
Chapter seven, Dynamic Reconfiguration of Talent, makes the point that you need to treat employees and vendors as unique individuals. The examples are good, but firmly rooted in IT. You won't find much here about companies designed for innovation, like WL Gore or who revamped their innovation model around business practices like Proctor & Gamble.
The final chapter, An Agenda for Managers, promises that the author's model is the one that will be the basis for innovation and value creation. For me, this was a mixed bag of a chapter. There's good advice like "learn by doing, take small steps." But then there's a twelve step agenda that offers gloriously non-specific advice like you might get from a fortune cookie. Example: "A long-term focus with short-term actions is the essence of organizational transformation."
Read this book if you want a deep, thoughtful discussion of some major trends in business. There are many statements and examples that will get you to stop and think.
Don't be surprised if a lot of what you read seems familiar. N = 1 echoes what Peppers and Rogers covered in One-to-One Marketing. R = G sounds a lot like "The World is Flat." This is an informed rumination by a couple of very smart men about how the world of business is changing
When you are done you will have stretched your thinking. You will ponder how the world is changing and how smart the authors of the book are.
Those are not bad outcomes. But they aren't practical ones, either.
Useful analysis of the ongoing transformation of business Unlike many books on new economies or global changes, this work cites examples from around the world. C. K. Prahalad and M. S. Krishnan provide illustrative case studies from firms in India, Canada, the United States, Europe and elsewhere. They examine the various interactions among these firms and locales, grounding their theoretical discussions in reality. To add even more clarity, they also include many drawings and charts; unfortunately, these tend to force a simplistic Cartesian graphing system onto complex changes. Likewise, their abbreviations are more memorable than clear. Overall, though, these are minor glitches in an innovative and useful study. The authors' analyses of how firms are interacting internationally, and redesigning themselves and the nature of business in the process, are both interesting and valuable. Its discussions of broad trends are unusually well-informed. getAbstract recommends this book to executives and others committed to keeping up with change, especially on a large, even global, scale.
Not good in Innovation but in ICT architecture I like the author's statement about the significance of the ICT architecture and business processes. I also like the way they describe ICT architecture making it clear that not all applications can come off-the-shelf. I believe that a grown ICT architecture is a major inhibitor to innovation and flexibility in the enterprise and the authors show why. If this book had a title like "The future of business processes and ICT architectures" and provided a longer list of tools and concepts for transformation I would give it 5 stars. Instead I had a hard time deciding how to rate this book. On one hand it is very entertaining and even scary in the chapter on human talent, on the other hand it is very much on the surface and does not contain a sound proposal how to deal with all that change. Like other reviewers I must admit that the title "New Age of Innovation" is quite misleading. It is true that the authors make a statement about the importance of innovation but than fail to link their concept of the future enterprise to innovation. So the topic becomes implicit and one is left to his or her own thoughts about it. I am also not very happy with the statement that enterprise success will primarily depend on incremental innovation and that radical innovation is more or less an arbitrary event one should not count on. Please accept my apologies If I misinterpreted the authors in this point. At least I think this topic lacks the clarity it deserves. I would recommend this book to executives who have some time to spend on an airport and would like to be entertained (or scared, depending on who you work for) by a vision of an ultra-mobile and global future. Some substance is provided by a long list of examples and a very general framework provides a scientific touch. I can not recommend this book to readers looking for advise how to design their corporate strategy because it a) lacks the scientific or at least quantitative basis to be considered correct in its assumptions and b) only provides very high-level and limited advise. I am also not very happy with the lack of references to other literature in this field.
The new age of Innovation After I had the oportunity to listen the "Soundview executive book summary" of "The age of Innovation" y bought and read the book. This new book of Prahalad brings the oportunity to reevaluate and redisign the general strategy for most enterprices. It is a great book. Erasmo Marin Cordova
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